


Build it up (watch it all fall down)

by snowshus



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Cameron Hodge - referenced, Gen, Jack Winters - referenced, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Violence, time displaced x-men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 08:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20738921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowshus/pseuds/snowshus
Summary: It's the future and in space, Scott should have been safe.





	Build it up (watch it all fall down)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [salazarastark (niewanyin)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/niewanyin/gifts).

The market of Reldasen on the edges of Shi’ar space is the largest in this arm of the galaxy. The locals say if you can’t find what you’re looking for at Reldasen you can’t find it anywhere. Last time Scott was here he’d been buying illegal medications with his father, so he knows how true the adage is. This time his team isn’t here for anything so difficult, just food fit for humans and something to fuel Danger until they get back to earth. The streets are full of people. Aliens of every type, every size, and every shape squeeze between stalls that line more established shops. The occasional tall building twist up like spires into the thick clouds that circle the entire planet. 

Scott pauses to look at a stall of flowers that glow bright purple (which means they’re probably actually blue) with leaves that fan out like a bird’s wings. The others drift down through the sea of life-forms past him. Scott turns to follow them when he sees him.

Scott is ten fucking years in the future and in goddamn space. He should have been safe. He should have been as far away from that part of his life as he could possibly have gotten. Jack’s supposed to be dead. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.

He can’t breathe. 

There must be something wrong with the air on this planet. Danger must have been wrong when she analyzed the atmosphere. Or something changed. There has to be - he can’t breathe. He keeps sucking in air and it’s like nothing is reaching his lungs. His vision fills with spots and he stumbles against a stall of fruit that looks kind of like fish Hepzibah had bought for him last time he was here. It tasted kind of like an orange and seaweed had been spliced together in a mad scientist’s lab. The alien running the stall who looks a bit fishy themselves starts yelling at him. His wave around and his voice is shrill despite the bubbling quality. It’s so loud. 

If they keep making noise Jack will notice. He’ll see him. He can’t. If he’s seen, Jack will take him again. He was free. He was finally free and safe and it isn’t fair. He doesn’t want to go back, he can’t go back. He couldn’t take it again. He’d rather die.

There’s a sudden blanket of soft darkness around his mind and big hands are pulling him away. 

There’s a tangle of voices that Scott can’t quite make up joining the yelling fruit seller. 

“Just take care of it.” A woman’s voice snaps cutting through the fog for a second before it regroups wrapping around him again before he can piece himself together enough to identify it.

He isn’t exactly unaware but he can’t really think either. He can tell he’s walking down an alley, he feels the alien bricks under his feet and see the corners they’re turning at but he can’t hold on to the thoughts enough to process anything. It happens and then it slips away. 

There are people next to him. Familiar people. There is a thick long arm around his shoulders it’s warm and strong and a slender one around his waist that’s doing most of the directing. They guide him away from the stall and the yelling fish-man and orange fish-fruit spilled on the dirty ground. 

Scott is afraid, even though the blanket around his thoughts he still remembers he’s afraid of...something. He can’t hold onto the memory of what scared him. It just slips away every time he tries to push through the fog. But the fear itself won’t quite leave. 

They turn down another alley and the sounds of the alien market drop away. It’s quiet - for real quiet, not just in his mind. 

“I’m going to let you go now okay. It’s going to be a little overwhelming.” A girl’s voices - Jean, it’s just Jeanie - says as slowly the warm foggy feeling around his brain starts to clear. “I’m sorry to do this to you, but you were having a panic attack and we needed to get you safe and diffuse the situation as fast as possible.” She’s explaining and the last of the fog drifts away and Scott remembers. 

Jack is here.

The panic slams into him again. Jack is here. He should have known he wasn’t really dead. Only good things stay dead. Bad things come back again and again, never letting go. Jack is here and he’s going to take Scott back and there is no Professor X to stop him this time. And Scott can’t, he can’t, he’s not strong enough to go through that again. It’ll kill him. 

His breath is coming in a short stattico rythme and there are hands wrapped around his shoulders so big they almost encompass him. 

“Come on Scott, breathe with me. In real slow and out real slow. You’re okay. You’re okay. Who ever you thought you saw, they’re not here. I promise. You’re safe. Come on, again. Real slow. Breathing in, and out.” A voice is saying but Scott can’t focus on it, can’t focus on anything outside of the way his lungs are screaming for air and the world is tilting and spinning and the edges are turning black. And Jack is here. 

The hands holding him are warm and soft. 

They’re not Jack’s. 

Jack’s hands were calloused and roughened and more often than not diamond hard. It’s not Jack. It’s like a secret code, the one magic word that stops everything. Scott’s mind slows itself, accepts that Jack isn’t here - at least not right here. He might be coming, coming back for Scott, but he isn’t here now. The person in front of him is Hank, and Jean is next to him her mouth a tight line of anger. 

“I will kill him before I let that happen,” She spits and the anger coming off her is a psychic wave but her fingers rubbing soft soothing circles on his arm remain careful. It might be that contrast that sets him off. She’s so angry (angry _for_ him and not at him and no one has been angry for him since his parents died-since they left) that he can actually feel it but she cares enough to keep her hands gentle. His chest hurts. His lungs tighten and thicken and rise up into his throat and his eyes start to burn.

“I need you to go.” He manages to get the words out, barely holding himself together.

“We’re not leaving you,” Hank insists, his long fingers running through Scott’s hair. “Not like this.”

“You don’t understand. I don’t think I can hold it back.” Scott pleads, as Bobby and Warren come around the corner their arms full bag of the fish-fruit he’d knocked into.

“You can cry in front of us.” Jean says softly. “You don’t have to hide from us.”

“I don’t care about that!” Scott’s voice rises with his panic and the welling of liquid in his eyes. He squeezes them shut hoping to stem the rising tide. “I don’t know if it’s safe.”

“Okay,” Jean says, always understanding the meaning behind things. At least now that her powers have come in. Her hand disappears from his arm. “Come on,” She says and Hank’s hands disappear too. Scott’s skin goes cold where they’re hands once were. He wants to beg them to come back, to bring back the warmth of that care. He has hated his mutation on and off for years but moments like these are when he hates it most. He doesn’t want to be alone. He doesn’t want to sit in a dirty cold alley fighting the tears that want so bad to fall while his friends wait around the corner. He pushes those thoughts down like the tears that have wet his eyelashes. He tries all his usual tricks, breathing slowly, figuring out pi has far as he can, trying to sink into this head until everything is numb. None of it really working, at least not fast enough. It’s so fucking cold.

“I iced up.” Bobby says, his voice only a few inches away startles Scott. “I’m pretty sure I can’t get hurt like this, not permanently anyways. There was one time, other me said, where he had to spend a week in hell, as like just a head. So I think whatever you do, it should be okay. But maybe don’t look directly at me - just in case.”

Scott can hear the creaking and cracking of ice as Bobby moves and the cold gets closer, hovering just in front of him. 

“I think it’s okay though. It feels like normal tears.” Bobby continues as a thin layer of ice forms under Scott’s eyes, cooling the heated skin. Snow collects on his lashes. It almost feels nice. “It freezes like normal.” 

The hand that touches his face is hard and cold and for a second Scott thinks it’s Jack and he pulls away. But the cold melts away and soft human fingers are brushing away the frost around his eyes, careful not to get too close or dislodge the glasses.

“They’re not really here.” Bobby continues. “I don’t know if Hank got to explain that. It’s an alien. It makes you see things that scare you. A fascinating evolutionary adaptation both camouflage and misdirection, according to Hank. He figures most people are fine ‘cause like their fears are too extestenial to be efficiently synthesized in a singular image.” Bobby explains and Scott can hear Hank’s voice in the explanation. “So like they find it unsettling but can just sort of shrug it off.”

“Oh,” Scott says. He’s so stupid. Of course Jack isn’t here, in the future, in space. He was an idiot to assume so. He caused so much trouble over nothing. 

“I saw Mr. Stanmer,” Bobby admits.

“Who was he?” Scott asks, mostly because he thinks Bobby wants him to. 

“He lived on the other side of the cul-de-sac from us. His daughter was a few years older than me but we were on the swim team together for a year so I saw him at meets sometimes and like block parties. Anyways, do you remember when we met?”

That catches Scott’s attention. Scott is pretty sure he will never forget that night. He’s seen a lot of bad things, been through a lot of things he’d rather not remember but the way Bobby had looked, barely fourteen and his huge terrified eyes that still couldn’t quite believe he was going to die still sticks.

“He was the one with the rope.” Bobby whispers. 

Scott grabs Bobby’s hand. “I wouldn’t have let him hurt you.”

“I know.” Bobby settles against Scott’s side squeezing his hand. “You and the Professor saved me. I know you’ll always save me. Even in this time, when we’re all mad at each other, I know if I - I mean old me - was in trouble you - old you - would still come and save me. But no one saved you, did they? The person you saw, they hurt you. ”

Scott holds Bobby a little tighter. “Yeah, yeah he did.” 

“Are you okay?”

“It’s over. He can’t touch me anymore.” Scott tries to believe himself.

Bobby doesn’t point out that wasn’t his question, possibly he doesn’t even notice. He just nods. “You have us now, we won’t let anything happen to you.”

Scott nods. He can almost believe that Jean’s anger and Hank’s intelligence and Bobby’s kindness and Warren’s stubbornness would be enough. But then again he remembers every police officer, every social worker, every concerned neighbor who’d heard him screaming, that had walked away from him with a dazed look in their eyes. For all Jean’s power, Jack had so much more experience. 

“Is it safe yet?” Warren asks from around the corner. 

Bobby looks over at Scott, waiting on his sign.

“Yeah, yeah you can come back.” Scott calls out. 

Warren walks around the corner, his arms still full of the fish-fruit and his wings casting dancing shadows on the walls. 

“The vender wouldn’t shut up until we bought all the ruined product.” He explains when Scott looks at the bags and bags of fruit. “Anyways, Jean and Hank thought it would be best if they got the rest of the supplies and we headed back to Danger.”

“I’m fine, they’ll need the extra hands.” Scott stands up quickly. He should have kept it together. It wasn’t even really Jack, now he’s messed everything up.

“Between Hank’s strength and Jean’s telekinesis I think they’ll be fine.” Warren points out.

“But-”

“Look I’m going back to Danger, you can either hope to find Jean and Hank in that mess by yourself, or you can help me carry all this.” Warren says jostling the bags in his arms.

The bags of fruit that doesn’t even taste very good are all Scott’s fault. He should help carry them. He should be the one carrying all of them, then he’ll go out and find Jean. Warren doesn’t let him actually take all the bags. But he does let him take most while he and Bobby split the remainder as they head back to the ship.

Bobby drops his bags off on the table in the middle of the galley and wanders off to talk to Danger. Leaving Scott and Warren to find somewhere to store it all. 

“I’m sorry, for all this.” Scott says as he and Warren try to find empty cabinets and cupboards. 

“Don’t worry about it.” Warren shrugs. “I mean Bobby suddenly figured out discorporation and hid behind Hank, and I-. And so like you weren’t the only one to have a freak out.”

“And you?” Scott asks, catching the aborted sentence. 

“Me?” Warren asks innocently.

“Did you see anything?” Scott presses. 

“It’s dumb,” Warren pick up one of the bags and tries to squeeze it into the fridge. “I saw Cam.” 

“Cam?”

“He was my roommate - friend- at the school I was going to before the whole wings thing happened.” Warren explains pushing against the fridge door which would not quite close. “We used to, we used to fool around sometimes. Nothing serious, just kissing and maybe touching, a little.” Warren stops pushing so hard. Just leaning against the door staring down at the floor. “He wanted - he wanted to try - you know - sex. I-I don’t know, I was nervous I guess. I didn’t- I wasn’t sure. It’s stupid. I don’t know why I saw him. It’s not like - it was fine, it wasn’t a big deal.” Warren says with a hard shove and the door finally shuts. 

“Did you ask him to stop?”

Warren shrugs, “I guess he didn’t hear.”

“Jack liked when I begged him to stop. He liked knowing he had all the power.” Scott says and there’s this horrible twisting in his chest as the words come out. Jean might have seen his memories and Hank and Bobby might have guessed but he didn’t _tell_ them. He’s never told anyone. The knot in his throat rises up again. The tears he’s spent the past five years holding back in terror burn behind his eyes before spilling harmlessly down his cheek. “He’d take my glasses, so I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t stop him without risking killing the neighbors. I think he picked the spots on purpose because there were always kids in the building. I couldn’t-not if it meant one of those kids could get hurt.”

Warren moves to Scott pulling him close and wrapping his arms around him. Scott’s face pressed against Warren’s shoulder, his glasses pushed askew as his tears soaked into Warren’s uniform - wet and salty and totally normal.

The thing about crying that Scott had forgotten is that you lose a sense of time when it’s happening. It’s different from the way he’d lose time in the orphanage, when hours or days or weeks would just be gone like they’d been stolen. It’s closer to the way time stopped mattering with Jack, when he hid inside himself, but where that had been an unending numbness that tried to leak its way into every moment, this was the opposite. Everything was immediate, everything was happening now, and all the ways Scott had of internally keeping time slipped away in the flood of feeling that poured out him and soaked into Warren’s shirt until he was empty. 

It is a strange feeling, being empty. He’s always held things in, neatly boxed up then shoved in a closet so full it always felt like the door was just one more secret away from bursting open. Now it has and everything has come tumbling out. 

That’s not really true. It’s really just the one box that fell and spilled it’s content onto Warren’s shirt. It feels like everything though, like suddenly his closet has so much room and door closes easily on the things he refuses to acknowledge. 

Coming back to reality is strange. The first thing outside of himself he notices is the heat prickling his hands where they’ve curled around Warren’s back, near the base of his wings. 

“You’re wings are really hot.” It’s kind of stupid, especially after he just spent however long sobbing into Warren’s shirt and probably ruining it and he should apologize since he knows how hard it is for Warren to get clothes that won’t burn.

“I know.” Is all Warren says, his hands moving in soothing circles across Scott’s back.

“I miss the old ones.” Comes out next which is even a stupider thing to say. He has no right to judge Warren’s choices about his mutation. 

“Me too.” Warren replies. “Don’t tell anyone but the real reason I voted to go with Magneto was because I accidentally singed Ms. Frost’s nice rug and I wanted leave before she noticed.”

Scott laughs even though it’s not really funny. Part of him wants to stay here forever, his face buried in Warren’s shoulder, his eyes forever closed and safe. But the back of his hand and forearms are really starting to burn. He reluctantly drops his hands and steps out of the circle of Warren’s arms.

“Sorry, about your shirt.” Scotts says rubbing at his cheeks and adjusting his glasses before opening his eyes.

Warren just shrugs and pulls the thing off, using it to wipe down his shoulder before handing it to Scott, who looks at it dumbly until Warren takes it back. 

“Close your eyes.” he says gently drying Scott’s cheeks with it. “You’re taking my turn for laundry duty since you messed up my shirt and all.” 

“Yeah. Of course.”

“I was joking.”

“Oh.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Warren asks carefully.

“It wasn’t real.”

“Real enough. Are you going to be okay?” He asks again.

Scott nods. “I have you right?”

“Always,” Warren promises.

They pretend history has not already made a liar out of him. Time has stripped the power from the words leaving them hollow and empty, a promise broken long before it was made. It doesn’t matter. Today, Warren promises forever and Scott believes him.


End file.
